Thursday, May 29, 2014

Football, hockey, soccer, basketball….pigskin, puck, and
bouncy-balls. Team A versus team B…. all played against team C……the clock.
Winning often comes down to managing the little hand. The final seconds could
take minutes that seem like hours with a barrage of commercials.

Baseball, alone, is a counter-clockwise board game defying
time. An inning might be a decade; a game simulating a lifetime. (Games are
longer now than ever before as stadium seating inches onto the playing field to
sell more premium tickets. As a consequence what was formerly catchable is now
just a foul ball). A few of us even go
into extra innings. Each season is long enough to streak, slump and streak
again, just like life.

Back in the day when I knew everything life seemed measurable
and linear, at least on the sports pages. Stats ruled. Records were set. Some
seemed insurmountable and still are. Others were illusive but attainable.
Nobody has hit .400 since Ted Williams in 1941. No one had run a four-minute mile
until 1954. A year before that Edmund Hilary of New Zealand, along with Tenzing
Norgay, climbed Mt. Everest…because it was there. Even if the British Empire
was no longer.

Milers came within a second or two of that magic number but
couldn’t quite break the barrier. An Oxford medical student named Roger
Bannister rose to the challenge by clocking in under four minutes by 0.3 of a
second. Three months later he bettered that mark by a full 2 seconds plus.
Since then over 1300 others routinely run under four minutes and over 3,000
have climbed Everest. Progress
confirmed.

Too bad social progress hasn’t followed the same narrative.
Older, and less knowing, I have come, more and more, to expect less and less.
Our high court is dismantling voting rights achieved 50 years ago. Congress has become irrelevant. Xenophobia
is sweeping Europe and threatens the great promise of the European Union. The
Russian Bear is growling after its brief hibernation. Science is under attack
from the Bible thumpers. At this rate we will soon wonder if the mile can ever
be run under five minutes.... running downhill on the Himalayas.

Why the gap between physical achievement and our (d)evolution
as custodians of the planet? The former seems progressive and the latter either
cyclic or glacially slow. Whether we are witnessing the final gasp of the 19th
century warrior/privilege mentality here in the 21st or an irreversible great
leap backward, is hard to discern. There are days when it seems we are climbing,
not Everest, but into our own abyss.

Which is why I take refuge in the alternative universe of
the sports section. More drama. Less murky. The players have evolved faster,
taller, stronger and certainly richer. At the same time they seem more fragile,
arrogant and not a bit smarter. When an alien civilization discovers our planet
a few light years from now they may reconstruct our society from out of the
debris on the baseball diamond. In among the bones will be sticks of wood, a
few pillows (bases) and mitts which will puzzle our visitors. They may conclude
we had slept on grass and clubbed each other to death with our oversize hands.
It may help to explain how we bulldozed our forests even as oceans rose and all that’s left of
Everest is a pitching mound.

On a more positive note it seems that athletic performances are a function of technology with leaps evident due to advances in equipment and training. They are less evident in team sports because the defensive improvements blur offensive ones. In terms of societal gains there will always be push-back as the power elite increases exponentially. However world wars have been averted through the threat of mutually assured destruction. Literacy and health are vastly improved in the developing world. We are a work-in-progress. I shall cling on to that word, Progress.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Since late April neighborhood streets have been festooned
with jacaranda blossoms, purple as prose but on them it looks good. One might
say they form a flamboyant canopy of lavender ribbon…..but I would never say
such a thing. And if I just did it’s because the power of the understatement is
inappropriate. If flowers could sing, and they do, jacarandas are opera; the
divas of spring.

Wildflowers come and go according to their mood and a
sufficiency of rain but jacarandas tolerate droughts well, dry throat and all, as
they must here in this rescued desert. From where do they get their deep dazzle?
Even if I knew I wouldn’t say. Some questions are best unanswered.

To give jacarandas their due the j is pronounced with an h sound or better yet a ch as in chale.

Their leaf is lacy, almost fern-like on branches which elbow
their way to mother sun. The blossom occurs in what are called panicles, giving
new meaning to panic in the streets.
Too bad for us their season is short here in Los Angeles. They disappear from exhaustion
after five or six weeks.

And we are bereft. But even when the branches are undressed
their petals drop a carpet below which looks inviting to everyone but the
homeowner who has to sweep away the sticky flower.

It seems to me this purple jacaranda rain used to fall in
late June but the warmest April on record is provoking the tree to bloom earlier.
If you can’t get enough of this wonderful stuff you can chase them around the world and
purple yourself year-long. There are worse ways to die.

What started in Argentina worked its way north through Central
and North America and then circled the globe. There are festivals in Australia
and Pretoria, South Africa, is named, Jacaranda City. A friend once told me that China banned
jacarandas after some important person had slipped on their fallen petals. I
can find nothing to verify this and chalk it up to mischief-makers on a slippery
slope. I shall defend the honor of jacaranda with my last purple breath. Anyway,
it couldn’t happen here. We have no important people.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

(This blog was originally posted in July 2010 but, as if to demonstrate my computer illiteracy, I pushed the wrong button and deleted it..........so I'm now restoring it in the only way I know how.)The closer we grow together, be it in marriage or friendship, we reveal our hot buttons. The relationship evolves as those sensitivities are respected and handled with care.Now I must write that on the blackboard a few hundred times and maybe I'll learn to follow it.What is it about e-mail? It seems to call out for a hasty response and can be the carrier of blurts. It offers the illusion of a parting shout at a distance, with impunity, across a chasm. It's a conversation without an immediate retort. However it lacks the tone, inflection and facial language that happens in conversation. The wagging tongue on the page might actually be lodged firmly in a cheek. E-mail is a dangerous toy. One man's chuckle may be another's poison. Even acting as conduit demands caution and discretion.Though it is over twenty years old we still don't quite know the rules of engagement; the ethics or the full potential and perils inherent.If telephone voices were transcribed to the page the benign banter or jocularity might well be lost. It begs the question about the nature of the way we communicate in this age of text-messaging and tweets.Looking back at the 19th century of belles lettres I suspect literacy was less pervasive and more prized. Words were carefully chosen, weighed and measured and nothing was more admired than a well-turned phrase. I'm sure Oscar Wilde got many free meals for the price of a bon mot. But if someone misspoke it might mean pistols at daybreak.Today we have a population of barely literate young folks who can read, if they must, but have difficulty composing an elegant sentence. They receive messages in bytes and slogans, think that way and express themselves in minimal squiggles. E-mail is already three technologies old. My grandchildren never look at theirs. Why waste all that time when the next best video game awaits?For those of us of a certain age e-mail has become a primary means of contact, across the miles or across the street. I get into some fevered dialog; sometimes I'm the instigator, sometimes I am just defender of the faith or cause or team. It's hard to apply duct tape to the keyboard; particularly so having staked out some highly minority positions.I hereby resolve to hold my acerbic tongue, to count to infinity before passing along "funnies" that might not be so construed and to avoid confrontational material that could result in the 21st century equivalent to a duel at dawn.Over time some of these raw nerves might be revisited for the "blurtee". And perhaps more deliberation can be extended accordingly on the part of the blurter.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Two emails arrived this morning from friends in big trouble.
One was allegedly held at gun-point in Azerbaijan and the other mugged in Chechnya
and robbed of all cash and means to get home. Send bank information, they
pleaded.

I might have swung into action even with my Batman cape in
the dry cleaner and Batmobile in for maintenance. I could be on a red-eye to Dagestan with a
connecting flight to Grozny to right the wrong and still be back by Saturday to
umpire a softball game.

It’s a good thing none of this was real. …except for the now
famous email hoax. It makes it tough on those of us who may actually get mugged
in faraway places. Truth and make-believe are drifting closer.

But not that close. Not nearly the way real glaciers, six
times larger than Manhattan, are drifting away from Antarctica causing oceans
to rise more than four feet, over time. This is not the only reason I’ve
decided not to buy that 87 million dollar house on the south shore of Long
Island. There is a large hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole and ozone-depleting photo-chemicals
have exacerbated the situation.

In spite of the compelling weight of evidence the Senator
from what was once-Florida, Marco Rubio, choose make-believe over reality as he
gurgled his latest idiocy denying made-made climate change. As the late Senator Daniel Moynihan put it, You
can have your own opinion but you can’t make up your own facts

Of course these folks are not all that stupid; just
self-serving demagogues pandering for dollars. President Eisenhower's Sec. of Defense, Charles Wilson once remarked, What’s good for General Motors is good
for the country. This has never necessarily been the case and surely isn’t
now. Not when corporate America prospers overseas with cheap labor and tucks their profits away in Caribbean banks. What lifts the poor and middle class is good for the country and that has
to be more than a trickle of crumbs.

Deniers of climate change are funded by polluters, coal and
oil companies and their network of corporations reliant on petroleum products
as well as investment firms, mutual funds, etc… The list is long and their
pockets deep. Rubio and other presidential hopefuls, must park their brains
outside and supplicate before entering the vaults.

The sycophants have a difficult task to perform. They have
to persuade the electorate that their interests align with the Koch Bros. This
is exactly what they are good at. Witness the make-up of Congress or the Reagan
and Bush presidencies. The so-called grass-root Tea Partiers are a congregation
of the greedy and gullible loudly proclaiming God on their side. They have
designated Science and Government as the anti-Christ. Voters who return the
Deniers back to office must be the same folks who turn over their bank numbers
and credit cards to the e-mailers requesting emergency funds for friends
stranded in the murky corners of the planet.

To be sure not all corporations contribute to global
warming. There are many who function with a social consciousness. However the
lopsided distribution of wealth attests to the muscle of corporations who write
the laws and stack the courts heedless of environmental damage.

Now if I get an email from a friend who went
to photograph the penguins and is adrift off Tierra del Fuego I just might
believe it.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Sadly, Justice is one of those
bloated and hollow words that dies on the lips when spoken. It could mean
anything from retribution to reparation to forgiveness. For many people it is a
euphemism for revenge though it passes for fairness or closure.

In front of the Supreme Court building there is a statue of a female figure,
blindfolded, holding a scale which represents impartiality. Regrettably, the
majority of our present court issue decisions are extensions of their ideology
and serve their political agenda. They mock justice.

We seem, at times,
to have moved very little from the ancient Hammurabi Code. When Saudi fanatics
attacked us on 9/11, rather than address their grievances, Bush-Cheney felt the
need to dump their vengeance on Iraq and Afghanistan; and eye for a tooth…
since the corresponding eye wasn’t available. After all, Saudi Arabia is our
friend so Dubya took the opportunity to avenge the mischief of Saddam Hussein
on behalf of his father and Cheney smelled that black stuff under the sand. Any
act of violence can be rationalized as bringing the adversary to justice. This
isn’t far from the schoolyard bully saying, he started it. In fact every act has its antecedents.

Even in baseball, the gentlemanly sport, when
a batter is struck by a pitch, retaliation is in order, according to the
unwritten rules of the game. The same mentality holds for former players and
managers. Tommy Lasorda, in his infinite wisdom, commenting about Ms. Stiviano
who exposed Donald Sterling for his racism said, I don’t wish that girl any bad luck but I hope she gets hit by a
car.

The Greek plays
grappled endlessly with this revenge ethic. Agamemnon had to destroy Troy since
Paris abducted Helen (daughter of Zeus). But the winds ceased to move his sails
unless he sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia. When he returned ten years later
his wife, Clytemnestra, gave him his just dessert, a sword to his innards. Then
she pays for her act. In short, the house is cursed. And so maybe is the human
condition.

Gilbert &
Sullivan had their say, after mocking such punishment as decapitation, when
the more humane Mikado sings:

My object so sublime / I shall achieve in time

To have the punishment fit the crime / The punishment fit the crime

On the other hand John
Updike writes of a young man (himself?) who throws pebbles at his father. The father asks him to stop and when he
doesn’t slaps the boy’s face. As a blow it was neither hard nor soft; it had
the perfect quality of justice.

It seems to me the
highest form of justice is to hold the offending part accountable, then urge
some form of remedial education n (or confinement if incorrigible) and finally
to turn the other cheek .When the mother of a hit and run victim was asked to
testify against the drunken driver who killed her daughter she declined telling
the court and family of the defendant that she offered forgiveness.

Will we ever evolve from
the punitive ethos to this point? Where survivors of a terrorist attack can
open their hearts to the perpetrator and end the cycle of vengeance? Too
humanistic perhaps ..to presume that the Injury done is reciprocal and
sufficient punishment for the person who must live with it? It works for me.

And that’s not a bad thing. In the Argentinian-Brazilian
film, Found Memories, seemingly
little action takes place. If your taste in movies runs toward a strong
narrative with fast-paced plot twists do not see this movie. However if you
want to sink into a life/death, meditative visual experience of a few people in
a rural Brazilian town it is one not to miss. Glacial pacing and repetitive
scenes transport the viewer into the spatial and temporal life of the town
folks. The indoor scenes, in particular, have the feel of stepping inside a
Rembrandt painting. One wants to hit the pause button to hold the image. Many
could stand alone as museum pieces; in context they are even stronger.

The setting is a ghost town occupied by near-ghosts, elderly
folks, who have forgotten how to die. The gate to the cemetery is locked. The
village café owner says he is not unhappy enough to be dead. Their existence is
simple, reverent and communal. Madalena, well on in years, is shown kneading
the dough for bread each morning and carrying it in a basket along railroad
track almost grown over from disuse. Part of the daily ritual is her insistence
to arrange the loaves on the shelf of Antonio, the shop owner, followed by his immediate
removal of the bread. The playful jockeying between the two closely resembles
affection. He then makes coffee which they take outside with a roll. It has the
feel of a secular communion, wine and wafer.

The town folk are clearly living in the past, holding fast
to memories of their loves and regrets as if time has been halted. Madalena
writes nightly letters saving her emotions for her dead husband. When a young
photographer arrives routines are hardly ruffled, so quietly is her presence
registered. Almost imperceptibly she insinuates herself into Madalena’s household.
She is observant of her ways and gradually gains her full trust. At one point
she remarks, I’ve never heard so much
silence. The girl with the camera might be seen as a stand-in for the
director of the movie. The aged Magdalena’s old photos seem to merge with the
recent ones developed by the character of the young woman. Out of this linkage
a conflation of the two worlds emerges as well as a bond between them. When the
time comes, Rita, the young woman is asked to assume the baking of bread which
has taken on a spiritual dimension.

The original Portuguese title translates to, Stories That Exist Only When Remembered,
which give the film a faintly surrealistic tone. More impactful than the
memories is the rhythm of quotidian lives captured by the filmmaker. She
reminds us of the humanity beneath the surface of what first seems like
withered lives.

Another art film recently watched is the French movie, The Artist and His Model. It is set in
occupied France, 1943, outside a small town near the Spanish border. Art
transcends the historical moment in this finely nuanced story. As in the
aforementioned South American movie a young woman enters the life of the
protagonist and is a catalyst for quietly profound change. We witness the slow
process of the sculptor finding his grand subject in the particular form of his
model. The camera pans reverently over the contours of her body exploring the
light and shadows as only black and white film can do.

I can think of no other film which traces, as a felt
experience, the interior movement of an artist as he exceeds his own
constraints and breaks into new consciousness. It is the act of discovery; the
painstaking extrusion through his material as it comes to life. The grand form
is realized not from any classic pose but comes directly out of the raw emotion
from the life situation of the model.

The nothing that happens to ordinary people is teeming with
life.

Both these films have become available for an American
audience thanks to Netflix streaming. It calls attention to the dearth of U.S.
art films and the vibrant life of cinema around the world.